platform launch/raise announcement

content/blog/Launching Honcho; The Personal Identity Platform for AI.md

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+---
+title: "Launching Honcho: The Personal Identity Platform for AI"
+subtitle: Plastic raises $5.35M pre-seed from Variant, White Star Capital, & Betaworks to build critical AI infrastructure
+date: 05.10.25
+tags:
+  - announcements
+  - honcho
+  - fundraising
+  - dev
+  - philosophy
+---
+## TL;DR
+
+We're announcing two major milestones for Plastic Labs:
+
+1. **Honcho as a hosted platfom.** 
+
+	We're granting early access to power per-user personal context management for AI agents & applications starting today!
+	
+	Honcho is now a simple, complete, hosted solution for adaptive agent memory, social cognition, and personalization.
+
+2. **Our pre-seed raise of $5.35M to solve personal identity for the agentic world.**
+
+## Individual Alignment
+
+Despite being generative, most AI products still focus on being most palatable to most people. This limits the scope of personally useful behaviors and results in poor UX, high churn, and handicapped abilities.
+
+AI systems need mechanisms to understand each of us on an individual level. They need methods for cohering to our psychology and personality. They need social cognition to eliminate cold starts and build long-term relationships.
+
+They need Honcho.
+
+## Honcho Platform Early Access
+
+Today we're launching early access to the hosted Honcho platform.
+
+It's the most powerful personal identity and social cognition solution for AI apps and agents.
+
+Honcho is a cloud-based API that enables more personalized and contextually aware user experiences. It simplifies the process of maintaining context across conversations and interactions, allowing developers to create more responsive and customized agents without managing complex infrastructure.
+
+Honcho combines flexible memory, theory of mind inference, self-improving user representations, and a dialectic API to get your application the context it needs about each user for every inference.
+
+All this happens ambiently, with no additional overhead to your users--no surveys, no hard coded questions, no BYO data requirements needed to get started. Honcho learns about each of your users in the background as they interact with your application.
+
+When your agent needs information about a user, it simply asks and Honcho responds with the right personal context--in natural language--which can be injected into any part of your architecture.
+
+Context from Honcho is far richer than simply retrieving over session data or cramming it into the context window because Honcho is always running theory of mind inference over that organic data. It's expert at deriving everything there is to infer about a user from their inputs.
+
+The result is a living, thinking reservoir of synthetic data about each user. Honcho gets to the bottom of up-to-date user preferences, history, psychology, personality, values, beliefs, and desires. It maps personal identity. This creates a self-improving representation of each user that transcends the raw data in information density and furnishes much more robust and useful context to your app when it needs it.
+
+To put it simply, this creates magical experiences for users that they don't even know to expect from AI applications. Honcho-powered agents retain state, adapt over time, build relationships, and evolve with their users.
+
+That's why Honcho needed to be built. It's memory infrastructure that goes way deeper than anything else on offer. Theory of mind and identity mapping are tasks to optimize for, requiring serious machine learning, expertise in the cognitive sciences, and AI-native solutions.
+
+If you want to deliver best-in-class personalization, memory, time-to-value, trust, and unlock truly novel experiences to your users, we want to work with you. 
+
+We're giving early access to teams & developers starting today.
+
+## A Personal Identity Layer for AI
+
+The release of Honcho as a platform is just the start, the next step is Honcho as a network.
+
+An engine for social cognition and deeply grokking personal identity is a game changing tool for AI apps, but owning your personal Honcho representation and taking it with you to every agent in your growing stack is world changing.
+
+It's what's required to truly realize Plastic's mission to decentralize alignment--to give every human access to personally aligned, scalable intelligence.
+
+So we're building a network--a data layer--through which Honcho representations can be shared among all your AI applications.
+
+The Honcho network will allow what's learned about a user in one application to be used to deliver superior experience in another. By aggregating context from myriad agents and settings, Honcho representations can become so high-fidelity as to asymptotically approach the real-time complexity of each user's actual personal identity. 
+
+We believe this will unlock profoundly new kinds of AI products and experiences. Every agent in the network can be just-in-time personalized, personal context can be used fluidly between agents, marketplaces can emerge, and *critically*, users can be empowered with sovereign control and ownership of their representations.
+
+This vision stands in clear opposition to legacy approaches to user data, but in the latent agentic economy, has clear advantages. For users, using Honcho will mean that their personal data is at once more secure *and* enables remarkably better services. And for business, provides a positive-sum alternative to web2's history of feudal data governance, allowing them to punch above their weight relative to massive walled gardens.
+
+Honcho will be critical AI infrastructure--enabling individual agency to scale and radical innovation from open-source to startup to enterprise, from vibe coders to fully autonomous systems.
+
+## Our Pre-Seed Round
+
+The final announcement today is Plastic's $5.35M pre-seed round, led by [Variant](https://variant.fund/), [White Star Capital](https://whitestarcapital.com/), and [Betaworks](https://www.betaworks.com/).
+
+The round also includes participation from [Mozilla Ventures](https://mozilla.vc/), [Seed Club Ventures](https://www.seedclub.xyz/getfunded/ventures), [Greycroft](https://www.greycroft.com/), and [Differential Ventures](https://www.differential.vc/), along with angels like [Scott Moore](https://x.com/notscottmoore), [NiMA Asghari](https://x.com/ywayisaway), and [Thomas Howell](https://x.com/seethomasowl).
+
+It's a group of deeply aligned investors who share our vision of a more personalized and decentralized AI future.
+
+Funds will be deployed directly toward the talent, growth, and compute required to realize the full vision of Honcho.
+
+We're just getting started.
+
+## Plastic's Mission
+
+Plastic's mission is to radically decentralize alignment. Your AI should be an extension of you. You should dictate how it's aligned. And you should own the data used to do it.
+
+Most LLM applications are still optimizing for homogenization, if not outright determinism. They're trained or prompted to behave according to a set of standards and values that you don't have participation in. 
+
+They're aligned centrally, top-down.
+
+But as we use AI for ever more cognitive and agentic tasks, this situation becomes fundamentally untenable, if not unacceptable. Imagine your notebook manufacturer engineered it such that it refused to store memories. Or if it took ownership of those memories? What if your word processor didn't approve of your style, or the ideas you need to explore?
+
+That would be ridiculous. Paternalistic. Limiting.
+
+When you come to depend on a piece of technology, it becomes an extension of your personal identity. We shouldn't tolerate unaligned appendages, but this is the current situation in AI. And it leads to a chronic lack of trust we must overcome to unlock the real potential.
+
+Instead of imposing opaque alignment schemes, we should be subverting the problem and working in the opposite direction--vesting everyone with the liberty and technology to align their artificially intelligent augments as they see fit.
+
+If you want work [IRL in NYC](https://www.therefineryatdomino.com/) on the most impactful and important work in artificial intelligence, we're hiring for four more roles immediately:
+
+- [[Founding ML Engineer]] - Shape the future of AI at Plastic, tackle challenges across the ML stack, train cutting edge theory of mind models
+
+- [[Platform Engineer]] - Build & scale Honcho's infrastructure, define performance & security for the future of AI personalization
+
+- [[Full-Stack Engineer]] - Design Honcho's user facing applications, iterate rapidly on creative, exceptional user experiences
+
+- [[blog/content/private/archived/Plastic Intern(s)|Plastic Intern(s)]] - Work on real AI products with customers eager to use them, accelerate the team across full stack, machine learning, and platform engineering roles
+
+Get in touch! 
+
+Let's build 🥽.

content/careers/Founding Engineer.md

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----
-title: Founding Engineer
-date: 02.24.25
-tags:
-  - positions
-  - dev
-  - announcements
----
-(NYC, Full-Time)
-
-## About the Role
-
-We're searching for a founding engineer to help build the future of Plastic. As a key technical leader, you'll work directly with the CTO to architect and implement Honcho, our distributed user representation infrastructure, while co-creating the next generation of decentralized AI agent coordination systems.
-
-This role requires a systems-oriented engineer who can architect, build, and maintain complex distributed systems from the ground up. You'll make critical technical decisions across the entire stack, from designing scalable distributed architectures to implementing robust backend systems and managing cloud deployments. You'll also help shape our technical strategy around distributed consensus, network reliability, and system scalability.
-
-While distributed systems expertise is core to this role, we need a versatile technical leader who can fill gaps wherever needed. You'll be responsible for end-to-end ownership of projects, from high-level architecture to hands-on implementation. If you're excited by solving complex distributed systems challenges, can think deeply about system design, and want to help define fundamentally new technological paradigms, let's talk.
-
-## About You
-
-- 3-4 years experience in similar roles or equivalent
-- High cultural alignment with Plastic Labs' ethos
-- NYC-based or open to NYC relocation
-- All requirements listed for our [[Full-Stack Engineer]] role, plus...
-
-### Technical Expertise
-
-- Deep experience with distributed systems design and implementation
-- Strong background in containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad, etc.)
-- Experience building and maintaining microservice architectures
-- Familiarity with distributed consensus protocols and eventual consistency
-- Background in handling distributed state, caching, and data replication
-- Experience with high-throughput, large-scale network systems
-
-### Leadership & Execution
-
-- Adept at thinking globally & locally, at multiple layers of abstraction, & high-level synthesis
-- Comfortable solving problems with high-agency, broad freedom, & significant responsibility
-- Track record of managing projects & shipping/owning end-to-end
-- Experience in system design, maintaining projects, deploying, optimization, architecture, & rapid iteration
-- Strong DevSecOps background
-
-### Additional Qualities
-
-- Up to date interest in OS AI community & LLM technologies
-- Experience with cryptography, machine learning, or identity systems, a plus
-- Complementary interests in cognitive sciences (linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, etc) or other adjacent interdisciplinary fields, a plus
-
-> [!custom] [APPLY HERE](https://wellfound.com/l/2B3D7V)
-
-(Back to [[Working at Plastic]])